New Hardware Models Highlight Nintendo's No-Transfer Policy

An article at Wired discusses the difficulties involved in transferring games that were purchased and downloaded online when users replace their Wii or DSi. "Neither the Wii nor Nintendo’s portable DSi consoles have an upgrade path for downloadable content, since games are tied not to user accounts but to specific machines. It’s impossible for a user to copy content from an old console to a new one. Even some Wii owners whose machines have malfunctioned said it was difficult, or impossible, to get Nintendo to transfer the software licenses at its headquarters." One gamer, who bought the recently released black Wii console, explained that she got Nintendo to transfer her games, but needed to "mail both of her Wii consoles to Nintendo, and wait two weeks," hardly a convenient solution.

Comments

Backups on the DSi

[Mornedhel]

The not so funny thing is, you can back up your downloaded DSiWare games to the SD slot, but you can't restore them to just any DSi, they're tied to the one you downloaded them from.

About the only use I can see for this is if you have bought a lot of DSiWare and want to free some of the internal storage. Even then, since you can re-download them as many times as you want (still on the same console), it's not very useful.